I wouldn't say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.

I agree that Bethesda's RPG writing is amateur at best, and I can't dispute that there can be some good points in Dishonored. But at least for me, a mark of bad writing is that I find myself unable to care about the outcome for any of the characters in a story, and in Dishonored, I personally didn't care much about any of the character's struggles or personalities, as they were all pretty one-note. I can't recall a single character's name from Dishonored except for Corvo, since I found it novel to hear Stephen Russell as a main character again (big Thief fan, which incidentally I would point to as a game with excellent writing).

There was one instance in the main base/hub of dishonored 1, where there's a short excerpt of a story about a whaler in a book, I think in the room where Emily was supposed to chill out in. I thought the writing of that little short story was so compelling, I sat back in my chair after I finished it and thought "Why isn't this game about that?", because I felt it highlighted how boilerplate the actual game's story was in comparison. So in that way you're right, the micro-writing, the world building, the atmosphere, is all top notch. I just wish the characters and plot were able to match it, as then it would be a masterpiece.

I should mention that I'm pretty difficult to impress with writing in video games, as I don't think most of them can compare to the quality of writing available in books except for a handful of examples such as Thief, Gemini Rue, Mafia, and the original Deus Ex.

TL:DW, JPEG is getting old in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.

However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.

Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.

Quite happy about all of that. :)

JPEG is getting old long in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.

However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google's decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.

Interesting aside for anyone interested; you can subscribe to her Peertube account with your Lemmy account by searching !veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube in your instance's search bar (or clicking that link). Then any video she uploads in the future will show up in your lemmy feed, and any comments you leave on lemmy should show up on the peertube video! :D

They used c++ initially since it was spawned from SerenityOS, which was designed to be a mashup of win2000 and unix.

now that Ladybird is its own project, it's not constrained to that goal, and they have said they will incorporate modern languages.

He's showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn't make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.

Ross wrote a response to Thor's in the comments of this video, but it's a bit buried. I'll include Thor's for context as well:

Thor:

I'm aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It's entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.

If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It's a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can't agree with.

Ross's response:

@PirateSoftware I actually wasn't planning to write to you further since you said you didn't want to talk about it with me and I'll still respect that if you'd like. But since you brought up what I said again I'll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:

• I'm 100% cynical, I can't turn it off. I wasn't trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they'll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I've said before I don't think I'm the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can't just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren't huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren't the target audience, but you're in complete opposition to the movement also.

• I'm literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won't be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.

• In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it's manipulation, but I don't control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.

• It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we're in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it's kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.

Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I'm concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don't like it.

The industry has shown us how they absolutely cannot be trusted, while FOSS applications have shown us they are sustainable and will always put the user's interests at heart, with Blender being a prime example.

We have to stop funding closed source software, enshittification is inevitable.

If we all donated the price of Affinity's perpetual licence to Krita, Kdenlive, and Inkscape, we'd have a suite of tools that could outcompete them all, and never have to worry about another acquisition.

Silver lining: less flights booked means less emissions for the environment.

Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner.

According to the video, and this article, JPEG XL is backwards compatible with JPEG.

But I'm not sure if that's all that necessary. JPEG XL was designed to be a full, long term replacement to JPEG. Old JPEG's compression is very lossy, while JPEG XL, with the same amount of computational power, speed, and size, outclasses it entirely. PNG is lossless, and thus is not comparable since the file size is so much larger.

JPEG XL, at least from what I'm seeing, does appear to be the best full replacement for JPEG (and it's not like they can't co-exist).

The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.

WoW's server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.

Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.

Please be aware, Odysee was recently purchased by a Crypto company that also acquired an NFT company.

For more info, see my comment here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/9749921

I would not recommend investing any time or money into the platform, as it will inevitably crash and burn as the owners walk away flush with cash while everyone else is left holding the bag.

Peertube is not ideal, but it is currently the only alternative that isn't tied to a shady crypto scheme.

The LiMux project in Germany had some shady stuff going on in the background. Microsoft almost certainly bribed the new conservative government to switch everything back to Windows. There was a great documentary about it from DW that interviewed some whistleblowers, but I can no longer find it. However, Quidsup on Youtube did a good video encapsulating the course of events.

EDIT: I was able to find the documentary by searching the old title in German, which brought up the original German version, and from there found the English translation!

Long is an interesting example, since he definitely did strongman Louisiana politics, but he did seem to have the working class interests at heart, where as Trump only pretends to. We didn't get to see what he would do long term, but its been argued that his presidential run, and more specifically his 'share our wealth' program forced Roosevelt even farther left in his policy.

Share the wealth proposed to put into federal law a wealth cap of 5 million for every American, with the excess used to fund what amounts to a universal basic income back in the 1930's, and didn't discriminate against minorities. It also advocated for free education, free healthcare, and a 30-hour work week.

From all the information I've seen, including the excellent Ken Burns documentary, the poor and working class of Louisiana loved Huey for legitimate reasons, while the rich and politically corrupt, who were targeted by him, absolutely hated his guts.

Quite glad to see Mint looking forward, good on them.

The Godot developers created a new business entity that will facilitate porting games to closed platforms.

I've seen you all around lemmy, and always enjoyed your takes on things. It's crazy to learn that you've been going through all that all the while. I hope things get better for you, man!

Bernie Sanders is pretty spotless if you look at the history of his career. He's consistently stood up and voted for the little guy.

Love the idea of this. I believe slowly building up these alternative, open-source and decentralized platforms will be pay off long term as the centralized platforms bloat and die via enshittification.

You may be overestimating how familiar they are with the specifics of IVF. It could be perceived as simply as "IVF means more babies, which is good, because I want babies. But abortion means less babies, which is bad."

If those people like that perception, they will resist or deny any further detail that would jeopardize those perceptions to remain willfully ignorant, especially if they have utilized IVF themselves. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong otherwise.

Phrononix's forum is known for having some of the most toxic individuals in the open-source ecosystem, with flame wars, pointless complaining and arguing happening usually starting within the first 10 comments.

I have no idea why or how it got so bad there specifically, but it's bad. Though oddly enough, in-between all the negativity, will be developers of major systems, like AMD driver engineers, calmly talking with other big movers in the industry.

I guess it's one of the few sites that is dedicated to reporting on such things, but boy howdy is it an odd mix of spiteful users and developer networking.

For those who can't watch the video:

Across the globe, companies can simply say you DO NOT own your games as long as they have a EULA, and it even gives them the power to destroy your ability to play a game!

Ross Scott (of Freeman's Mind and Game Dungeon fame) has done the leg-work of researching how much power these companies have in various countries, and what he found was that, as a gamer, you effectively have the same amount of rights as a squirrel.

The only way to stop this practice would take millions of dollars to fight it legally in court, and uh... I don't really see any millionaire gamers willing to take up that cause. So, in any realistic sense, the corps have won here. There's nothing we can realistically do, short of boycotting.

BUT, that doesn't count for the EU, Scandinavian countries, Canada, UK, or Australia. Unlike the US, they actually have functional consumer protection laws, and ways for consumers to fight back against corporate overreach without needing to have a few million in the bank.

If you live in any of those countries, we could use your help! It would help even further if you've purchased and own The Crew at any point in time, but you can help even if you haven't!

If you live anywhere else, you can STILL help by helping sign a French consumer petition, which has real weight to do something, it isn't like one of those pointless change(dot)org ones! But to participate, you must have owned the game.

You're on the front lines of consumer protection for gamers across the globe! Your actions (if we're ultimately successful) would likely have ramifications even in the US and Canada!

How can you help? If you can't watch the video, here's the website with a step-by-step guide on what you can do to help: StopKillingGames.com

This is likely going to be the biggest push for consumer protection for gamers there has ever been, so... Like, it's kind've a big deal. Let's make this count, guys.

There is at least the Unihertz Jellystar, which is a fairly nice tiny phone. Personally I'm likely stuck with Pixel phones because I'm a big fan of Graphene OS, otherwise I'd likely pick one up after my Pixel 4a fails, which might be awhile, since it's still going strong.

The Eternity Dev has returned, and released a new update for it. Last I checked the update hasn't released on f-droid due to the build failing, but it is available on aurora or play store.

Sublinks and piefed don't compete with lemmy, or at least, they don't weaken the ecosystem since they are all inter compatible.

There's also Piefed (Federates with Lemmy and is sympathetic to Beehaw, created with Python and Flask), and Sublinks (Drop-in replacement for Lemmy created with Java).

Also, I would personally be a little wary of choosing Kbin, as the developer's behavior over the past few months has been concerning. Mbin would likely be the better option between the two, but that's just my 2 cents.

So they were bought by Forward Research.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arweave-adds-over-7m-users-140000864.html

Foward Research is a crypto blockchain company that owns Arweave, which as far as I can tell is trying to incorporate crypto into a cloud data storage service. It's all very vague, but that's what I sussed out.

I wasn't aware that odysse was originally a crypto video sharing platform, I thought it operated more like YouTube.

Forward Research also bought solarplex, which they boast as having sold "over 120,000 NFTs", which tells me all I need to know about their intentions.

I'd steer way clear of this, nothing good can come of it, and if you have any doubts, watch Folding Ideas NFT video.

Stick with Peertube.

This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:

TL;DW:

• Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
• EU won't commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
• EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
• Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
• Existing laws don't seem to cover this issue.
• Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to "the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go".
• UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
• Also in UK, there's a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
• No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
• Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.

This is a simplified version of simplified version.

ROCm is it's own hell (unless they finally put some resources into it in the past couple years)

Meta is partially responsible for genocide, so it's not actually that much of a stretch, honestly.

At least in the communities I'm subscribed to and interact with, I've still seen it mostly be positive interactions.

A not insignificant portion of online games utilize the steam friend system exclusively to enable inviting others to your party, and would not function otherwise. One example off the top of my head is Hunt: showdown.

PNG is a lossless format, and hence results in fairly large file sized compared to compressed formats, so they're solving different issues.

JPEG XL is capable of being either lossy or lossless, so it sorta replaces both JPEG and PNG

For anyone else reading this and thinking about trying linux for the first time, be sure to use Linux Mint. It will give you the smoothest and easiest experience, and you pretty much never need the terminal. It even comes with a really nice software store (but everything is free).

I'm a moderator of r/LinuxHardware on reddit. It has 76k subscribers, and receives about 150k unique pageviews per month.

After using Lemmy for a while and loving it, I decided to officially have a presence here, and partnered with the owner of !linuxhardware@lemmy.ml (Liam from GamingOnLinux) to have it be the official lemmy community.

I then wrote a post that I pinned in the community describing how to move to lemmy (as well as including a link to your Fediverser thing :D), and added a Fediverse section in the sidebar directing people here.

Unfortunately, it never really seemed to get much traction in the community, which also happened to vote not to remain dark after the API change a few months ago.

If I had to estimate how many followed through and came to lemmy, I would hazard a guess at around 30 to 50-ish people, based on the quick subscriber growth on the lemmy community, but that may have just been from already existing lemmings subbing from my announcement post at the time.

When I have the time, I'll try writing up a call to action referencing Reddit's announcement that they will sell their data to AI companies.

Also, one community that may be more receptive specifically to switching due to their data being sold is r/Privacy. I made a comment about lemmy there calling for people to leave for greener pastures, and it seemed to get a good amount of upvotes. But it is a large one, so it may not be the best 'target' for converting.

I don't want to be too negative here, and to any mods that read this, if this is too negative, feel free to remove this post. But in the time that I've been a Kbin user, this is what I've personally witnessed.

The Kbin developer has a tendency to disappear with no communication for months at a time, likely caused by taking on way more load than one person can handle without burning out (He is virtually the only developer of Kbin, is taking on developing the Kbin mobile app, is the only admin of the largest Kbin instance, Kbin.social, and the only moderator of multiple communities there, which have languished in his absence, as seen in the posts on m/Kbin and m/Kbin Meta).

He appears to have an extreme lack of trust in others, wanting instead to take on all responsibility himself. This becomes an issue when he disappears, since he is the only one with merge privileges on the Kbin github, resulting in many PR's for hotly requested features languishing until he suddenly reappears, having been silently working on some aspect of the backend without informing anyone else, making collaboration difficult.

That difficulty appears to be why Kbin was forked into Mbin.

As an example of the trust issues: Even though the Kbin community has repeatedly asked to be able to help him manage Kbin.social, either as an admin or putting in requests to moderate his communities filled to the brim with spam, nothing has changed, and it's been business as usual.

Before his most recent absence, he mentioned he was going in for a minor surgery that would leave him laid up for a couple days, then went radio silent for over a month, leading people to fear the worst. When he reappeared recently, his explanation for why he didn't post a quick "Hey guys, I'm okay, but won't be around for X time," was that he didn't want to "Cause chaos." 🫤

Boycotts are fickle things, sometimes gathering a following big enough to make a corporation cave, but many other times, not getting any steam at all.

And even if a boycott is successful against one company, it doesn't mean they won't try the same thing again, or try their usual 'do something extreme, then walk it back to where you originally wanted it' two-step, which is generally very effective at getting what they want. They know how to manipulate the public to their desires, they have whole divisions dedicated to that (though sometimes even they get caught unawares). If we went this route, the issue is that this tactic is done frequently enough that people would likely get boycott fatigue. "Ugh, another campaign? Another publisher screwing us? I just can't anymore."

At least against corporations, actual consumer protection law is a much more reliable long-term solution to an enemy that will try every tactic to avoid real, effective change in favor of the consumer.

What the fuck dude.

Did y'all not defederate from them? My instance did.